Thanks to Nathan from Lava Row, Social Media Genius

It feels like I’m coming back from the dead, but it’s really more like coming back from the bed. Publishing my book was all the feelings multiplied by fire hose delivery. It was so satisfying completing a project I’d worked on since 2010, and the feedback from other writers and true soccer fans was amazing. The internet backlash and misogyny was not. I learned so much, so fast, about so many things, it took me a while to process it all.

Then came the MLS All Star game in August and a funny thing happened. I woke up after a night of drinking and felt awful. Luckily, I was staying with my friend Phyllis, who gifted me the best memory of this particular morning. I drug myself out of bed and up to the kitchen and said,

“I can’t go drinking anymore this weekend. I think I’m pregnant.”

Phyllis, having witnessed my four year struggle to conceive our third child tried to steady my rocky seas with reason.

“You’re just hung over. Did you take a test?”

But I knew. The eternity we’d waited for our “Hat Trick” baby was coming to an end. The pregnancy gave me an all to welcome excuse to enter a hibernation-like sleep. I was tired of rolling my eyes at internet trolls accusing me of shamelessly self-promotion of my book (because y’know, artists, writers, musicians never promote their own work). I was hurt when American Outlaws withdrew their promised support for my book, and worse, I was angry when they offered little support when their own members made Twitter accounts to harass me. To have internet trolls announce my deeply wanted pregnancy on Twitter and joke about it being a mistake was the last straw. It was a good time to turn off my blog and block my internet haters for a while, because telling a pregnant woman to be unemotional about such things was unreasonable, and I had better things to focus on.

Now she’s here, our Hat Trick, and the fog of pregnancy and early motherhood is lifting just in time for the Women’s World Cup. Two games in Winnipeg sounded like a great idea for a ten hour road trip to my husband and older kids and I didn’t have the will to be the fun-hater that would point out the a ten hour drive with a newborn would take almost twenty hours (when you throw in the three hour wait at the border). YES! Let’s take a seven week old to Canada!

As we arrive in Winnipeg, it doesn’t seem so bad. The kids played soccer and partied with other soccer fans at the border and the Hat Trick Baby didn’t complain one bit about taking three hours off from her car seat. (Although she’s clearly letting us know she’s ready to get to the hotel now….5 more minutes baby. I’m excited to go to our first Women’s World Cup since our first born was a baby in 2003. I’m excited to be in Canada for the first time since I was a kid. I’m excited to see what WoSo looks like now that so many of our soccer buddies are traveling to support it.